He Regrets Marrying my Mother! OR was it the Alcohol?

“I regret marrying your mother!

Rose, I regret marrying you!”

My head froze. He called mama by her name. Like they do their mother – him and his brothers. I wondered why he had to tell me marrying her was a mistake. What I was supposed to do with that information.

Her knees were bleeding from the friction of being pounded on the living room carpet. I found him on her back, wrenching her hair out of its roots. His fat fingers had the devil’s grip. She had begun bleeding from the head.
I tussled him to the door after calling for assistance from the house help. Mama’s throat was getting dry from the pain of screaming.

They had been fighting over things; money, women, alcohol, and us. Sister was fast asleep. It was bad. My veins were coming out. I was crying from the hard scenes just witnessed – and the words dad threw at me. I regret marrying your mother? What the hell was that?

It’s right here with us. Hell.

Father was drunk. The bottle loosened his tongue. If that’s what it took to say his truths his heart was a scary place. If you’ve never seen the devil’s horns, my friend, look at people’s hearts.

It was the umpteenth night this kind of haunt seizing our home. Home was a war zone. Those two fought like shooting stars colliding. I was surprised they never managed to jerk each other’s throats out. We were treated to wall to wall two-three nights apart mouth-watering action that Stone Cold Steve Austin and his counterparts at WWF had worked so hard to perfect for years. And even so, we’d only watch them once a week on KBC. In our house, people only slept like decent human beings for two nights a week on average. I hated it!

I started doubting whether he was my real father. But God, our nails resemble like rice grains and my facial expressions could only come from one man – him. I tried to decipher if mama knew what she was getting herself into when she married this man. If she also had regrets, even three children later. But also, how do you give birth to three children with somebody you regret marrying? How does the sex feel?

I’m still waiting for time to ask her these things. I want to understand.

One day while we lived in Huruma at Trigan, they had one of those nasty brawls. A moment mum was explaining something and within a blink, dad had jabbed her face with his mean left fist. He has robust teeth which he uses to bite his lip when he’s mad. A few minutes later he was throwing down her clothes from the first floor for public display. I think my dad had always wanted to be a performing artist who people would stop their lives for. He liked putting up shows. I could not get why he was so angry he had to humiliate his wife like that.

I don’t know how mama is still alive. She’s been strangled, abused, taken for granted and scorned by this one man whom me and my siblings came from. You know, that’s really tough to take. Because we could not kill daddy, give him a better heart and raise him back to life. If we killed him he would not come back.

The bitterness I’ve had to grapple with over the years could light up an energy plant for eons. My anger was cosmic. I’m still working on it. It was mixed up with the stars, meteors, Jupiters and Saturns. That could make you kill somebody.

As I grew up, society did not want me to talk about these things. I was expected to shut and go about life without sharing my painful childhood experiences because as they said, I was not the only one who had been through a rough life and people should respect their parents. But how much are parents ever told to respect their kids? Who is supposed to do this job? What happens to the countless broken children all over this world who are still fighting their childhood pains brought about by their folks and are struggling to even express themselves about simple things? Do we have to teach people to block everything they feel to be politically correct?

Our mothers have suffered in the hands of the men who promised to take care of them on altars. Then society turned a blind eye on them, watching them die and turning up for their funerals like they cared so much. I know people will say men are also being abused in marriages. It’s true, but let them tell their stories. Tell everybody to come out.

The chaos affected my self-esteem. I’ve struggled to connect with my father for the longest time. Things are getting better. It’s slow, but slow is better than nothing. I’ll write more about it in my first memoir which I’m currently working on.

You hurt a child’s innocence they stop trusting you for the rest of their lives even when they want to. It is many a people’s tale. They have never found a way to express it or who to do it to. And I’m telling you who is out there, go back and take care of your pain or it’ll destroy everything you’ve ever worked for as okay as you think you are. Go back and heal it. Forgive the people you have to forgive. Talk it out. Write. Share your experiences for catharsis. Go for therapy (I’m planning to. Inbox me {rixpoet@gmail.com} if you need contacts for this). You need help. Our parents need help. Our siblings too. Everybody needs help.

We were trained to bulldoze ourselves through pain without saying a word. Somebody lied to us that that’s a brilliant skill. Now we can’t talk about our simplest concerns without sounding selfish or abusing someone. We are broken. You and I are broken. We need help.

I lived my life looking for this peace in relationships. For some reason women were not enough for me. Somebody either had too many flaws or they weren’t interesting enough. I kept looking for a place to dump my rage. People like me need a special kind of love that feels like electricity. Yeah, that shocking. We want to be deeply seen and appreciated for the smallest things. We want to be deeply touched because that is how we know how to love – to touch people deeply.

I had to learn the hard way – nobody can ever take care of you if you don’t will to do it on your own. You are alone. Unless you die from a bomb explosion or some crazy fire that they couldn’t identify you and no-one claimed your body they had to bury you in a mass grave, your coffin is personal. Your grave is personal. Try make your happiness personal too. It’s the only way people will identify with you because your light will not be a reflection but a Source. A beaming Source.

Violence is not okay. You don’t have to stay. God understands. Love liberates. Leave if you need your life back. Please leave.

“Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” (2 Cor 3:17)

I’m still healing. If you get there faster come back and hold my hand.